The nature of bulkheads is to fail. Will bulkheads of nature work better? Mao liked to tell the story of the Foolish Old Man who wanted to improve the view from his farmhouse by moving two mountains. Shovel by shovel, generation after generation, he got his wish. Shovel by shovel, generation after generation, the Cuyahoga River was made tame through […]
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Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress was inspired by a narrative series of paintings of the same name by William Hogarth. Mussorgsky’s piano composition Pictures at an Exhibition was prompted by… pictures at an exhibition, featuring works by his late friend Viktor Hartmann. Van Gogh’s The Starry Night inspired an orchestral work, an opera, and, for better or worse, Don […]
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ARTISTS: Squidsoup & Anthony Rowe | United Kingdom ORGANIZATION: Kent State University Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative An installation on the unused streetcar level of Veterans Memorial Bridge uses the light of the ’69 fire to point the way forward. Perhaps you’ve heard? The Cuyahoga River caught fire fifty years ago. When Randy Newman’s ironic ode, “Burn On,” called […]
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After high-profile projects like the Cleveland Trust Building’s transformation into a grocery store, and with BAYarts’ adaptive re-use of the former Huntington Playhouse in the works, John Williams looks back—and forward. by Jeff Hagan John C. Williams does not consider himself an architect. He jokes that he accidentally signed up for his first architecture course because in the course catalog […]
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Beautiful Jails Angélica Dass is no stranger to integrating art and numbers. Her best-known project, Humanae (pronounced “human eye”), involved 4,000 portraits of a wide variety of people, each staring straight into the lens and presented against a background matching the skin color of their nose, and placed and codified along the color continuum of the Pantone Matching System (PMS) […]
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Indrė Šerpytytė’s Two Seconds of Colour, rectangular painted color fields stacked brick-like in a grid, looks like a work of vibrant minimalism, and that sensibility is only enhanced when the work is presented as a series, as it was last year at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. It’s pleasing, with a nearly lulling effect. But Šerpytytė, a Lithuanian […]
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The Times review from 2014 was not much more than a blurb—an attempted takedown of Chicago-based conceptual artist Michelle Grabner by critic Ken Johnson dripping with contempt. It must have irked Johnson that he was duty-bound to refer to the artist, whom he dismissed as a “comfortably middle-class tenured professor and soccer mom,” as “one of the curators for this […]
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